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Friday, June 03, 2016

Kenya's Politics Of Crises and Forgetting

Earlier this week, on the
eve of Madaraka Day, history paid Kenya another visit. Online photos of CORD principals,
Raila Odinga and Moses Wetangula in a jovial meeting with President Uhuru
Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, at State House, Nairobi caused a bit of
a stir. But it shouldn’t have. As I explained last week, we have been here
before.

Political crises have been
a near-constant feature of Kenya’s post-colonial history, and especially since
the agitation for electoral and constitutional reform began in the 1980s.
Politicians have perfected the art of taking the country to the brink of the abyss
of violence and anarchy and pulling back at the last minute. It is a callous calculation, where violence
and death are used as negotiating tools. If, as Carl von Clausewitz asserted, “war
is the continuation of politics by other means” in Kenya, crises and bloodshed
signal not a breakdown of the political process, but how it is inaugurated.

The script is always
the same: Opposition demands talks on reform or a redress of grievance. The
government refuses. Demagogues on both sides polarize public opinion, mostly
along ethnic lines. With few options, the opposition appeals to the street to
force the government to give in. The street demonstrations are met with police
violence and after enough Kenyans have bled and died, the government gives in
and agrees to talks.

This is politics
reduced to a staring contest, where the goal is not to avoid crises but to ignite
them. It is a politics that is managed via crisis, in which Kenyan citizens are
not the end, but as the means of contestation. It is a politics obsessed with
the problems and welfare of politicians, not so much those of the people who
are reduced to pawns in a game of elites.

There is no true
animosity between the main protagonists, despite the hateful rhetoric employed
to galvanize their supporters. In the end, the politicians remain friends and
business colleagues and country club mates. The politics they have created and
perfected eschews permanence and commitment, whether to principles, policies,
friends or enemies. The only defining characteristic is ambition.

Of necessity, in
rejecting permanence, it also rejects history. Who, after all, wants to be
reminded of their hypocrisies? Or that their current BFF was the declared mortal
enemy of all Kenyans in the last election cycle? In kowtowing to the
politicians, Kenyan media also reflects much of this aversion to history and
context. Political events and crises thus seem to spring out of nowhere,
without history or context, and just as quickly disappear into nothingness
without actual resolution once the politicians have gotten together to
rearrange their seats at the table.

This is what is happening
with the current dispute over the fate of the IEBC commissioners. Despite the
fiasco witnessed in the 2013 election, there has been little discussion about it
in the last three years. Neither the opposition nor the government have shown
much interest in addressing the failures witnessed during the election or the problems
highlighted by the subsequent petitions filed against the 2013 results,
especially the petitions against the Presidential poll. Now, with just over a
year to the election, precipitating a crisis appears the only means our
politicians can imagine to address the issue.

Historical amnesia is apparent
in the way they have proposed to drive the talks forward. Apparently, a deal has
been reached in which each side will nominate five people to a 10-member
committee, composed solely of Parliamentarians, to conduct the talks. This would
be little more than a resurrection of the 1997 Inter Parties Parliamentary Group
process which, as I discussed last week, then President Daniel Arap Moi used to
blunt the push for reform by excluding all other interested players, especially
those from civil society.

So today, as the
country breathes a sigh of relief, the politicians have put yet another one
over us. Once again they have successfully gotten us to bleed over their
problems and ignore our own. No wonder they seemed so giddy at their State
House get-together.